Why we don’t mention my great-grandfather’s namehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/48.19/why-we-dont-mention-my-great-grandfathers-name
Aaron A. Abeyta on his family’s shadowy past in New MexicoI.The snow came early in 1949. It seems a miracle that my father, then just a boy, would be allowed to ride 17 miles, through a blizzard, so that he and my abuelito might rescue the herd.

There is no magic to the way sheep die in a blizzard. It is not from the cold. They huddle together for warmth, their bodies like pills in a bottle, and the snow falls and the sheep do not move. They suffocate beneath a slow avalanche of accumulated snow. Even when the snow is at their eyes, the sheep remain motionless as windows, witness to their own demise but patient, a primal faith that their shepherd will save them.

Even at 12 years old, you take note of death around you. If you live on a ranch for any period of time, you will learn the ways things die; a calf dies near a pile of concrete at a fence line in the middle of a June prairie, bitten by a rattlesnake. As a grown man, you will still hear the mama cow cry into a bright, cloudless day — loss’ eternal echo. You will inherit a racehorse named Master Bars from a family friend and marvel at the animal’s height and elegance, but you will struggle to understand why, come winter, despite the snow everywhere, the animal refuses to eat the same hay as the other animals. The most beautiful animal we’d ever seen died on a January night. He was not beautiful in death, a frozen emaciated corpse, 18 touchable ribs arching into the January day. The lambs abandoned or sat upon by their mothers will be placed in a collective memory. The lambs that survive jump and play in the March mornings to heal those watching. You will remember all the calves born into snow banks, their bodies frozen within minutes, so motionless you might swear they were made of wood or of ice. There will be Suffolk rams bloated and green at the edge of alfalfa fields; a saddle horse mistaken for a bear; a semi tractor-trailer that didn’t slow down as the herd of sheep crossed the road to water; a vandalized stock tank releasing 35,000 gallons, turning the earth around the trough to a mud so deep and thick that seven cows and one calf would die there — their still-living eyes being eaten by crows. You will remember how your father fell to his knees in the very same mud and gave the calf CPR, and you will feel shame for feeling relief when he finally gives up.

In the regular world, it wouldn’t make sense to send a 12-year-old, on horseback, into a blizzard, for a 17-mile ride to the high country, but to all of us who know death so well, it does. It is our job — thankless and necessary — to keep death at bay. This is why my father and his father saddled up in the 4 a.m. dark of a late September, the moon a vapid pearl behind the storm clouds, and they rode off toward the west, toward a herd of sheep that would all suffocate to death if they did not do so.

My Great-Grandfather’s Name

My bisabuelo abandoned a wife and four children. The oldest boy — an 8-year-old — was my abuelito, Amos. He tells of how cold the house was. He recounts the trains that passed on their journey north, bellies of coal brimming black as burnt-out suns, the trucks of the gondolas rocking along the standard-gauge line, the slow and heavy clatter of a passing train, a noise receding in a drawn-out minor key. There, the boy hunted for fallen coal in the gray ballast that was the track bed. I imagine how each piece of found coal was equal parts joy and resentment. The older man I knew would not have come home until the bag was full. That black bituminous load upon his shoulder was a burden that even time did not lift. My grandfather was made of stone, and my awe of him was only tempered by a greater fear. There is some speculation that, perhaps, I have inherited his shoulders.

My great-grandfather was named Serafin — a name treated as sin. Fragments of words and stories of him have fallen to the floor and been collected in a dustpan of partial stories, memories and impossible clues that were set to flame by anger. He abandoned his family so completely that my grandfather, whose middle name was Serafin, chose an absolute deletion of his father as vengeance.

Victor “Cuba” Hernandez tends Abeyta family sheep in snow squall on the Taos Plateau, en route back to Mogote, Colorado.

Steve Immel

II.the elk calf

i am looking for scattered sheep in the wilderness

the herder has fallen ill i am on foot the horse

is in the wind the horse is smoke the horse is pollen

the horse is ghost and the dogs have no loyalty to me

i am walking the meadows of rincon bonito

the old men call the spruce at the meadow’s edge

los brazos translated the name means arms but

the ancient meaning is shadow and silence

i must enter the spruce my abuelito’s

voice tells me i must get the count we must

know how many have died how many will not

return to the llanos south of home we must

know how much of our winter work

has been lost here in this late june

i will not find every sheep

it has been too long the herder

sick for five days i am only eleven

but i know what death is i have

seen the violence of what

dogs can do the neck wounds that

only coyotes make

i imagine the calf female

weigh her with my eyes

forty pounds i tell myself

the clearing is small no grass

small bits of bark twigs dark as morning dark

spruce needles the gold of dying things

cling to the still wet animal her amniotic sac

a yellow shawl on her shoulders ears wet

the placenta and cord at her nose

i pray to God silently

that i am allowed to witness this

pray that the cow elk

is only at the spruce edge of the forest

her large and sleek body somehow brought

into the safety of a shadow

human eyes cannot penetrate

i pray because that is what my abuelita

has taught me to do

pray that my being here this accident

will not mean the death of this animal

i dare not touch what

my touch will doom for having touched

Andrew Abeyta and grandson Adrick during shearing in 2015.

Steve Immel

as a man i carry this anger it is

untraceable yet i know my father taught it to me

with his blood with his stories he loved

all of us enough to teach us not to trust

even so his eyes have in them the dark well of mercy

this vine of flower is watered by fire and it is my life

beyond the newborn elk calf

the spruce drop down a slight slope

light enters in razors of dust pillars of gold

at the edge of the clearing there are

six sheep buried in the duff their bodies

bloated bellies green and blue

necks broken

i am eleven the horse is

in the wind and the dogs

have no loyalty there are

two ravens at the edge

of the trees the invisible

magpies are crying into the day

i look back toward the elk calf

i do not know what to do i

am alone i pray because that

is what i have been taught to do

i pray for myself i pray

for the count and perhaps i

pray that too much death will

not enter into my life i must

have prayed for something like that

o dear and brutal day

do not seep into my young heart

dear Lord and dear Saint Francis

look over the newborn elk calf

may her mother hear her chirp

may her mother lift her head and

run toward the sound and may

all living things that have not

yet done so dear Lord

may they suckle

o dear and brutal day

whose light is pillars through dark

arms of spruce may the horse

return to camp and may the dogs

always be loyal

Victor “Cuba” Hernandez’s summer trailer in the mountains of the Cruces Basin Wilderness, where he tends Abeyta family sheep.

Steve Immel

o dear and brutal day

here where i stand at the edge of

death and birth protect me

o small voice that was me

a thousand years ago tell me

which way the bear has gone and

lead me away toward safety

and living sheep small voice

that was me so long ago let me

sing later let me not know too

much anger let me sing forgiveness

remind me o small voice

that my father has sent me here alone

because he loves me and understands

that men must know their fear

if they are ever to love

dear and brutal day

heal the herder and lead

the horse home lead too

the mother elk to her calf

lead her to lick the newborn clean

lead her to eat placenta and cord

lead her to swallow the danger

the scent of these things brings

my abuelita has taught me to pray

she tells me our faith is made of

three pillars prayer penance

and action that there are eight

types of literature in the bible

this is one of them she has

taught me to pray

i would give away most anything

to hear her voice again i would

give away words and anger

i would give away fear and joy

i would give away this abyss between

life and death i would

give away this spruce and

every wilderness to

have her lead me in prayer

just one more time

i am just a boy

she died the winter before

i ask her to ask God to

save the elk calf i did

not dare touch i ask her

to walk me back to the

open meadow and i ask

that the count not grow

too high or too heavy

for my young body to bear

Andrew Abeyta, son of Alfonzo, holds an orphan lamb after a 2015 snow storm that left 26 ewes dead.

Steve Immel

III.When the snow began that September, the herd was near Rivera’s, a place the herders would go for wine, whiskey, and stories of bears, coyotes and hand-caught brook trout.

Sometime after sun-up, my abuelito and my father reached the Los Pinos River, 11 miles from home. From there, the horses would have to climb six miles to the northern end of a great meadow, where the sheep were trapped by still-falling snow.

The herder, Fidelito, knew the snow was racing the flock he was paid to tend. He saddled the animals and packed the camp in a rush, covering nothing. He pushed across the meadow, moving north toward a crest of great pink-and-green rocks and a small stand of aspen — the only windbreak. The herd would not travel any further. He worked the herd between two house-size rocks and let them rest among the aspen where the snow wasn’t as deep, to wait for the snow to stop or help to arrive. Sheepherders have an undefinable profound faith; they trust that even in the darkest moment that deliverance will find them. Two feet of snow had fallen, the sky still winter chalk, but Fidelito knew that my grandfather had already crossed the black ribbon of Los Pinos River water and that the horse would carry him to this promontory at the edge of a great meadow in the center of a greater wilderness in the midst of an even greater storm, and that somehow they would prevail.

My Great-Grandfather’s Name

Before he took the title from Jess Willard in 1919, Jack Dempsey was known as Kid Blackie. He’d make his money fighting in saloons, in makeshift rings or on warehouse platforms. The legend known as the Manassa Mauler was born just a few miles from my hometown. Even before he was champion of the world, people knew he was not to be quarreled with. To fight him was a stupidity reserved for unfortunates unaware of Dempsey or his reputation. Locals knew to steer clear of his taunts and bravado — bait to separate men from their paychecks.

Sometime after my abuelito passed away, I received a call from a distant relative who was working on a family tree. He’d come to the portion of the tree that forced forgetting had carved out: my grandpa Amos.

I told him that my grandpa was a five-term sheriff of Conejos County, who’d been shot twice by a man made mad by brujas — the first shot grazing the center of my abuelito’s skull just above the bridge of his nose; the second entering below the sternum, following the curve of a rib and exiting at the spine. I told him how, afterward, my abuelito’s right leg was never right, how I tended to stare at the jagged, pale, soft pink flowered scar in the middle of his back as he shaved over a kitchen sink overlooking the ranch he’d built from hard work, anger and resentment. I said he was the toughest man I have and will ever know.

Not surprised, the man asked if I knew how the rest of the family thought my great-grandfather a hero of sorts. He recounted stories his father had told to him; the admiration in his voice was audible. He told me of the time my bisabuelo fought Dempsey in a potato cellar one late August day in the voice of someone who’d been there.

Saw him fight once. That’s why that man hired him, because he was stronger than hell. It sure was hot that day, humid too. End of August and all the people down at the cellar had just been paid. Big thick clouds were over the mountains. Far-off lightning and thunder like it was coming toward the end of the world. I suppose it was right around evening. Most of those men had been loading hundred-pound sacks of potatoes all day, the loading docks were stacked with them, like a fortress of burlap, roots and dark earth. Stanley Barr said he was worth two men, the way he could work. Your great-grandpa was younger then, stronger too.

He paused, the phone was humming slightly. There was a great distance in that silence. I remembered it from my youth and knew it to be inherited and then taught. Then he resumed.

Everyone knew Jack before he was world champ. He’d left Manassa a few years before, but he’d come around every now and then. He was like us, poor as worn-out shoes. He made his money in the bars and potato cellars. We all knew that’s why he was there that evening. He said he couldn’t sing or nothing like that, but he’d knock the tar out of any man who put up a few dollars. Jack was meaner than hell. He punched like a mule kicks. No one was stupid enough to take him up on his offer. We’d all seen what he could do. Everyone just laughed and shook their heads. No fool would fight Jack. That sort of stupidity was reserved for miners and prospectors. Jack went on for a few minutes and most of the men had stopped working.

Your great-grandpa was stacking hundred-pound sacks near the top of the cellar; he had no patience for men who didn’t know how to work.

Everyone was just standing around taking a break as Jack was talking away the last of the light. It went silent as a funeral after your great-grandpa finally spoke up, something along the lines of you talk too damn much. Shut the hell up so we can get to work.

He wasn’t a miner or a prospector and he knew Dempsey. I guess his cup just filled up.

Jack would’ve fought him for free, he was so mad. Your great-grandpa came down from up top, a few dim bulbs, a setting sun and some far-off lightning were all we had to see by. He was dark with the dirt of potato fields with boots so beat down the heel was nearly gone. He must’ve been 20 pounds lighter than Jack.

I never saw Dempsey fight Tunney or Willard, but I saw him fight your great-grandpa. Jack walked across that platform like a storm and Serafin just stood there, his dirty hands balled up at his waist like he was too tired to lift them. I’ll never forget the way Jack shook his head after your great-grandpa hit him the first time, like maybe he knew maybe it wasn’t going to be so easy.

Alfonzo Abeyta, son of Amos, during shearing.

Steve Immel

IV.My father remembers this, perhaps above all things about those two days and the 65 years since. His father laid him down beneath a spruce, covered him with a canvas tarp stuffed with duff and spruce needles and surrounded him with three saddles to break the wind. Then he walked into the onyx night, into the wind that replaced the snow, and dug through the night to save the herd. My father doesn’t mention sleep, nor being cold, in his retelling of the story. He has sincere admiration — perhaps older than written words — in his voice.

Perhaps those two needed that wilderness. I cannot remember them getting along, not really. My father could never please my grandpa. I remember disliking the way he treated my dad. But I loved my abuelito. He was what we all wanted to become.

What drew my great-grandfather down from those potato sacks? Did he really fight Jack Dempsey until both men were too tired to continue? Did he abandon his family? Or is another story truer — that he’d had an affair with his boss’ wife, who then framed him for stealing? Was his leaving a story they told the children to protect them from knowing he was sent to jail? Can you spend your entire life forgetting the man who is your blessing and your curse?

Which is the greatest foe: the future heavyweight champion of the world; the arduous task of purposely forgetting; the blizzard that could have buried an entire herd alive; the blood of a father traced in the fists of his son; a wilderness of great meadows, house-sized rocks, wind and spruce; a 17-mile ride through a blizzard; shoveling for 12 hours straight; walking the empty sides of train tracks looking for coal; knowing that your oldest son wishes to never speak with you again; accepting a lie as truth; murdering away reconciliation; the daily task of never being satisfied? How do we come to know the thing that is most like us? I wonder if similar questions arise in places without mountains, rivers and trees made of shadow and silence. Surely, this is the work of the stormy and fierce heart of every human.

Dawn broke, the wind finally stopped, and faith was rewarded. My father rose from his bed of spruce needles to the sound of axe against timber, the constant thump of it as two small trees were felled. The trees were tied to my grandfather’s horse. Only the heads of the sheep were visible, but he rode the horse around the herd several times, clearing a path with the wake of the trees. Then he pointed the horse north, downhill, toward the river and home. Fidelito and my father urged and pushed a sheep onto the broken path. One by one, the sheep broke free and walked after their savior toward lower ground. By noon they’d crossed the river. By nightfall they’d all reached home, alive.

All of my grandfathers are gone now. On occasion I drive the road up from the river, and I recall the camps, the good meals, the horses that went missing, the several herders, the animals we lost. Eventually, you reach a place where the road ends and there is a snow- and wind-battered sign that reads “Wilderness. Closed to motorized vehicles and motorized equipment.” It is known as the Toltec Unit, a cruel place with little water and a loneliness difficult to comprehend. So many stories begin for me there. The men in my life are always associated with places — both wild and on the side of a well-traveled highway — and stories. I will never know my great-grandfather. I know the story where he is a hero and another where he leaves. The stories of my abuelito and my father are more numerous and more complimentary. There is a grace in knowing I understand them.

I reach the rocks and aspen trees where the herd was nearly buried. The natural world is intact, as it’s been for centuries. The human side has faded in the proper order of things. The place is made sacred by my memories, strength and the brief kindnesses displayed there so long ago. There are names carved upon the trees, but there is no need to read them; I know all they have to say.

Excerpted from Wildness: Relations of People and Place, coming April 2017 from University of Chicago Press. Edited by Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerrfer.

Aaron A. Abeyta is the author of five books and recipient of the American Book and Colorado Book awards. Abeyta is a professor of English at Adams State University, and he makes his home in Antonito, Colorado, where he also serves as mayor.

“Ultimately, if we can’t make sustainability work on Bainbridge Island, blessed with an abundance of resources, how can we expect it to work anywhere else?”

Kathleen Alcalá spent six years seeking answers to this question, hitching rides on fishing boats and tramping through vineyards and greenhouses. Her long graying hair disheveled by the wind, she knelt alongside clam diggers on the chilly beaches of Bainbridge Island, Washington, where she and her husband have lived for the past two decades, in a quiet home sheltered by Douglas firs. What she found on Bainbridge was a rich, deep history of food production nourished by the wisdom of generations — from the first inhabitants, the Suquamish Tribes, to the immigrants who came to farm and fish this small woodsy island 10 miles off the coast of Seattle.

[SIDEBAR]

Alcalá, who has master’s degrees from both the University of New Orleans and the University of Washington and a BA in linguistics from Stanford, appears serene in the face of climate change. She’s focused on action instead of hand-wringing, and believes that the collective knowledge of various cultures can help us protect temperate, water-rich regions like her island home, allowing them to remain habitable for as long as possible, by as many people as possible.

A novelist and author of the new nonfiction book The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island, Alcalá looks to the earliest island residents for clues about how to approach rising temperatures and vanishing snowfall. “The Suquamish understood what was going on with land and food and climate change around them,” she says. “They knew there were cycles much bigger than any individual lifetime.”

The history of farming in the U.S., she points out, has its own cycles, and we have long relied largely on immigrants to cultivate and harvest our food. Bainbridge is no exception. Croatian refugees and Native Americans have tended the fields. First Nations people from Canada came to pick berries, and Japanese Americans farmed until the government forced them into internment camps after Pearl Harbor was bombed.

Kathleen Acalá harvests carrots from her community garden plot.

Jovelle Tamayo

Across the world, Alcalá says, people try to designate an “other,” a scapegoat for social and political issues. “This has happened to the Mexicans over and over in the Western United States,” she explains. “They tend to be more marginalized because it’s easier than owning up to the things that the people in power have done. Even in our politics today, it’s really fear-mongering, it’s this notion that we should be afraid of these people.”

The island’s farmers and fisher folk, with their wealth of knowledge in land and water-use management, are the primary subject of Deepest Roots. A self-described “middle-aged author with a bad back,” she studied those who tended the land before her and gleaned wisdom from neighbors who raise chickens, bees, sheep and heirloom vegetables, even while battling developers to preserve farmland. Inspired, she began to coax her own broccoli and zucchini plants from a rented raised bed. She became political, winning the battle to save a landmark neighborhood fir. And she acknowledged her responsibility to help prepare her community for the inevitable influx of people seeking arable land when heat and drought devastate other parts of the world. “We’re not trying to exclude people from where we live,” she says, “because I think that’s exactly the opposite of what needs to happen.”

Migration away from economic hardship and starvation to a more promising area of the world is nothing new, she reminds us. “Get to know your neighbors. Even if you don’t share their politics, you might really need each other at some point.” As an example, she cites partnerships between farmers and suburban Seattle homeowners that transform front-yard lawns into luxuriant rows of cabbages and lettuce and beans, which are then donated to meal programs and food banks. A nonprofit learning center called IslandWood brings Seattle schoolchildren to Bainbridge; photos show rapt students gazing into pond nets and plunging their hands into compost bins. Alcalá wants to create a similar sea-to-table program, allowing students to observe fishermen and women at work and enabling schools to serve seafood that kids have helped harvest. “And I’d really like to see pea patches and farm areas created closer to schools and homes,” she adds.

Researching her book, Alcalá says, has turned her into a crusader for sustainability. Simply reading about the subject, she observes, is passive. “It’s another thing entirely to give up an evening to go to a city council meeting and try to have input into whether or not we set aside land for agricultural use as opposed to development,” she says. “My hope for this book is that people will come for the scenery and stay for the activism.”

Melissa Hart is the author of two adult memoirs and the YA novel Avenging the Owl. She’s happiest roaming Oregon’s forests and rivers with her husband, 9-year-old daughter and their adventurous rescued terrier. melissahart.com

]]>No publisherBooks & AuthorsBooksClimate ChangeWashingtonCommunitiesGrowth & SustainabilityRenewable EnergyAgricultureNot on homepage2016/11/14 03:00:00 GMT-7ArticleWill a dam save the pallid sturgeon, or doom it?http://www.hcn.org/articles/will-a-dam-save-the-pallid-sturgeon-or-doom-it
On the Yellowstone River, farmers and conservationists clash over controversial infrastructure.Seventy million years ago, in the latter Cretaceous, the land that we call Montana had the same climate as modern Louisiana. Where wolves stalk elk, Tyrannosaurus rex hunted duck-billed hadrosaurs. The Rocky Mountains had just begun to rise from the plains, draining the inland sea that submerged present-day Billings. Grizzly bears and bison were distant glimmers in evolution’s eye.

But there were already pallid sturgeon.

Scaphirhynchus albus is among the West’s oldest and strangest denizens. True to their name, pallid sturgeon are colored a ghostly whitish-gray, from shovel-like snout to elongated tail. They grow up to five feet long, reach 85 pounds, and live nearly as long as humans. Their skeletons are made of cartilage; in place of scales, they are armored with tough scutes. Their toothless, extendable mouths slurp invertebrates from muddy riverbeds. And, like many fish, pallid sturgeon are gravely harmed by dams.

Pallid sturgeon have survived in the Missouri for 70 million years, but now fewer than 125 fish remain in the river's Upper Basin.

North Dakoka Game and Fish Department.

Beginning in 1940, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers strung a half-dozen mammoth dams along the Upper Missouri River, turning the waterway into a concatenation of reservoirs as it ran through the Dakotas and Montana. As High Country News has reported, the dams blocked spawning migrations, stifling sturgeon in the build-up of sand and gravel in which the fish deposit eggs and eliminated floodplains and side channels where juvenile pallids grow up. Although the river is stocked with hatchery sturgeon to prevent extirpation, fewer than 125 wild-born adult fish now roam the Missouri’s Upper Basin — the rapidly senescing survivors of an ancient population, perishing of old age, one by one by one.

Rejuvenating the pallid population, scientists say, will require opening access to the Yellowstone River, the tributary where up to a quarter of the Upper Basin’s sturgeon travel to spawn. While the Yellowstone is nominally the longest free-flowing river in the lower 48, migrating pallids find their passage blocked by Intake Diversion Dam, a chain of jagged boulders near the town of Glendive that raises water levels just enough to shunt flows into an irrigation canal. The diversion, authorized by Congress in 1904, provides water for some 200 family farms and 58,000 acres of sugar beets, barley and hay.

Today, the federal government insists that the best way to help this dwindling population is by replacing Intake with a new, fish-friendlier dam. Proponents say the proposed dam, a low concrete weir circumvented by an artificial side channel, would provide adequate passage for pallids to reach upriver spawning grounds. But the plan infuriates many conservationists, who insist that tearing the dam out altogether is the only sure-fire way to help sturgeon. “Many of the scientists who’ve been tasked with reviewing this project have rejected it as a decent use of funds,” says Steve Forrest, senior Rockies and Plains representative with Defenders of Wildlife. “The government wants to spend $57 million despite not having any certainty about whether it will provide tangible results.”

The Upper Missouri Basin’s dams have inflicted their greatest damage upon sturgeon embryos — translucent, tadpole-shaped newborns fresh out of the egg. These tiny migrants float downriver for days after hatching, covering anywhere from 150 to 500 miles, as they gain the strength and anatomy to swim. By dividing the Missouri Basin into short segments, dams fatally interrupted this developmental drift. Now the helpless embryos spill into reservoirs before they’re strong enough to propel themselves, where they're devoured by predators or suffocate in the oxygen-poor depths.

Potential salvation lies in the Yellowstone. If pallids could migrate above Intake dam, adult fish could take advantage of 165 miles of new spawning habitat, and embryos would have more space to drift. But while Intake resembles a natural rapid more than it does a goliath dam, it flummoxes fish nonetheless: In 2015, just one sturgeon passed Intake via a natural side channel. Most sturgeon must spawn below the obstacle, 70 miles from the Yellowstone’s confluence with the Missouri. Their floating embryos hit the mainstem and die in Lake Sakakawea, the reservoir formed by Garrison Dam, before they can morph into fully-fledged larvae.

Intake Diversion may not look like a massive dam, but it's a significant obstacle to sturgeon passage.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation

How best to assist fish beyond Intake has long been a matter of dispute. In 2010, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers authorized construction on a rock ramp that would have helped the fish swim over the obstruction. When that scheme was nixed, the agencies shifted their support to the new dam and its fish passage structure, a winding, 2-mile-long artificial bypass channel. Unlike the current Intake structure, a concrete dam wouldn’t require the annual placement of new boulders; meanwhile, the channel would recreate the slow flows and habitat that sturgeon rely on in the wild, helping the fish outflank the dam on their way upriver. “The bypass has velocity conditions and depth conditions that we know pallids will use,” says Patrick Braaten, a research fish biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey whose studies helped inform the design. “It should be able to facilitate the passage of sturgeon that are motivated to migrate up the Yellowstone to spawn.”

Conservationists like Forrest, and many scientists, aren’t so sure. Sturgeon are notoriously difficult to coax through fish passages, and, as well designed as the bypass may be, proof that the fish will actually use the channel is scant. An independent report commissioned by the Corps itself cautioned that there exists “no evidence” that adult fish will find and use the bypass channel in “sufficient numbers to enable meaningful levels of spawning and recruitment.” And on July 28, the Upper Basin Pallid Sturgeon Workgroup, a collective of state and federal scientists working on the species’ recovery, penned a letter arguing that the benefits of the bypass channel were “purely theoretical.” (The letter, which had not been reviewed by senior officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was swiftly rescinded.)

Forrest’s preference is simple: tear out the Intake Diversion Dam altogether and let the fish migrate freely up the Yellowstone. Dam removal has proven time and again to help fish rebound. Among the alternatives outlined in the project’s final Environmental Impact Statement, published October 14, is a network of pumping stations that would remove water from the river, pass it through fish screens, and dump into irrigation canals — a dam-less solution that Forrest calls a “win-win.” A similar system appears to be helping green sturgeon bounce back in the Sacramento River, where the Bureau of Reclamation permanently lifted the gates of the Red Bluff Diversion Dam in 2012. “The scientific community has been clear that taking out the dam is the best possible thing we can do for pallid sturgeon,” says Brad Shepard, a fish biologist formerly with the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department.

But the pumps have one major drawback: their price-tag. According to the Impact Statement, pumps would cost $138 million to install — more than twice as much as the weir-and-bypass option — and another $2 million annually to maintain. Some of those expenses would be passed on to farmers, raising the cost of irrigation. Not only are pumps expensive, they’re unreliable, says James Brower, project manager for the Lower Yellowstone Irrigation Project, which relies on Intake’s water. Keeping a dam in place is vital to ensuring the region’s survival, he says: “The only way to help the pallid sturgeon without ruining six separate communities is to build the bypass channel.”

If irrigators and conservationists can agree on one thing, it’s that Intake has become a distraction from the more intractable — and far more expensive — fish passage and habitat problems on the mainstem Missouri. “It’s a lot easier to pick on 200 farming families than it is to pick on flood control in the Missouri River,” Brower says. The final public comment period for the Environmental Impact Statement is set to close in late November, and a decision could come soon thereafter. Whether wild pallid sturgeon survive for another 70 million years may hang in the balance.

Ben Goldfarb is a frequent contributor to High Country News, covering fish, wildlife and other conservation issues.

]]>No publisherWildlifeMontanaEndangered SpeciesAgricultureRivers & LakesBureau of ReclamationGrowth & SustainabilityFishRanching2016/11/03 07:35:00 GMT-6ArticleHow to shear a sheep — and whyhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/48.18/how-to-shear-a-sheep-and-why
On the satisfaction of back-breaking labor.In a 2000 study, researchers at the University of Southern Australia found that by every measurement taken, from sustained heart rate to oxygen consumption to calories burned, sheep shearing was tougher on the human body than any other work measured. More energy is burned shearing sheep for a day than running a marathon. The study leader called it “the hardest work in the world.”

The second day of a new shearing season is worse than the first. By the end of the first day, I’m at about that stage of tiredness where a child would start to cry, but at least it’s the end of the day. The next morning I’m marginally less tired, but I have a day’s shearing in front of me. My handpiece has raised a blister on my ring finger that’s almost the size of my ring finger, and the parts of me that I know will hurt all day — legs, back, hands — already hurt.

It usually takes a professional one to five minutes to shear a sheep, yielding anywhere from a heavy, 14-pound fine wool fleece to a lighter coarse wool fleece around 5 pounds.

Kristian Buus

The last time I sheared a sheep, eight months ago, was the last time I did any kind of heavy physical work. Because my muscles have half-forgotten shearing’s intricate pattern of handwork and footwork, and because I’m already sore, I’m getting through fewer sheep than I did the day before and making less money. When I pause to ask myself what I’m doing here, 500 miles from my wife and my bed, up to my neck in sheep shit and grease, I find no ready answer.

My friend Robert says that the problem with shearing is you get addicted to the money. You end up shearing when you’d be better off doing something else. This is true about the money — in the spring in California, good shearers can make $700, $800 a day. But it’s not the whole story. Only after you’ve invested a few grand in your gear — which includes but is not limited to the handpiece mentioned above and the cutters and combs it runs, a grinder to sharpen them, and the shearer’s uniform, which looks like a bro tank and skinny jeans but costs more — then suffered like a dog through a season or two, do you start to shear at a lucrative speed. The work is also intensely migratory, so if you want to do it full time, you’ll spend most of that time living in motels or your truck. You’ll also have to reckon with the possibility that your body will be wrecked by the time you’re 50, maybe 40. There are easier ways to make money.

One way to make sense of it is to think of shearing as a sport, a contest of skill and stamina in which shearers compete among themselves. When you finish a sheep, you click your pitch counter to keep score. If you’re not doing it right, shearing can also be a contest between you and the sheep. It says something about the work that a lot of the guys I shear with are former high-school wrestlers, but the better the shearer, the less wrestling goes on. The goal is to keep the sheep balanced like a beetle on its hips, with nothing to leverage against and no choice but to sit still as you drive your handpiece through the wool. A good shearer takes the wool off at the first pass without breaking the sheep’s skin, quickly, with no fuss or struggle.

When it’s going well, the pleasures of shearing are comparable to the pleasures of surfing. A rhythm moves through you, and the sheep shears itself like the wave rides itself. This doesn’t happen to me often — I’ve been shearing for years, but now and again and never for long enough to get all that good. Still, just like a little surfing sharpens your appreciation for what a good surfer does, watching great shearers work gives me a sense of how good it must feel.

But even that is not what it’s really about.

To stop shearing at the end of the second day, to step out into the sun, bury your arms to the shoulder in a trough of cold water, then sit for a minute with a shook-up can of light beer — the sensory enjoyment of these things borders on the obscene. Emerson said, “Every ship is romantic, except that we sail in.” Shearing sheep is a temporary release from this bind: It makes things like sitting down, putting on clean clothes, even the simple act of not shearing into impossibly romantic activities.

When your wildest dream is to sit on the floor and drink a half-gallon of water, and every day this dream comes true, it creates a habit of satisfaction in your life that you have to experience in order to understand. There are easier ways to make money than shearing, certainly, but that may be the point.

Brian Kearney was born in Ireland, lives in Oregon, and shears in California.

]]>No publisherPeople & PlacesAgricultureEssaysFoodNot on homepage2016/10/31 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleWest Obsessed: The fate of rural food and farmshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/west-obsessed-the-fate-of-rural-food-and-farms
The staff of High Country News tackles tough questions about small-town agriculture.For something as important as food, many communities in the West struggle. That's because agricultural systems aren't really geared for the communities that harvest the food. In this episode of West Obsessed, the writers and editors of High Country News discuss some of the most interesting challenges — and solutions — to rural food supply.

]]>No publisherWest ObsessedAudioAgricultureSmall towns, big changeNew MexicoColoradoCommunities2016/10/17 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleWant to move to a charming rural town? Ask about the sewage disposal systemhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/wastewater-farm-hermosa-south-dakota
Wastewater inundation causes a commotion in South Dakota.One hundred acres are the beating heart of my South Dakota ranch. Century-old cottonwoods shelter pregnant cows through the winter, and it’s here that we harvest hay for the entire ranch and where my parents once planned to build their retirement home.

But last January, 1.5 million gallons of wastewater spilled onto this land from a sewage lagoon owned by the nearby small town of Hermosa. The town’s public works director was casual about the dangers and hostile to my questions about the effects of the spill. But a state employee, who specializes in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO), says cattle should be kept off the land for at least 30 days due to the high concentrations of E. coli bacteria.

A rancher on his property in South Dakota.

Julio Nolasco, Flickr user

I filed a complaint with the town and notified the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Since state law provides for substantial financial penalties for repeated violations, I expected hefty fines could inspire the town to clean up its mess. I hoped state experts could provide technical assistance to help the town meet its obligations.

At a town meeting I attended, however, officials admitted they had expected the lagoon to overflow because usage was overwhelming existing facilities. They also admitted that the lagoon was monitored mostly by the owners of the land, which violates state law. Like a good citizen, I expressed my concerns and then waited for state and local officials to do their jobs.

I have been utterly naive. Many rural elected officials have never even lived in a town. I try to sympathize: How can these folks plan for the growth and expectations of so many new citizens used to urban life?

This July, I took the granddaughter of the man who homesteaded my ranch in the 1800s to see the avenue of ancient cottonwoods he’d planted. She loved the view of the little town until I pointed out the lagoon. We avoided the polluted soil.

Now it’s fall, nine months after the spill. Across the highway from my sewage-fouled fields stands a new church, a new American Legion Hall and another subdivision. Going from post office to library in town, I ask residents if they know where their sewage goes. Most do not, so I tell them, pointing to the reeking pond across the highway.

I also remind the lagoon’s neighbors that the town has a reputation for dumping garbage on anybody living nearby and failing to clean it up. In 2007, when a flood damaged and destroyed subdivision houses close to the lagoon, an estimated 23,000 pounds of gasoline cans, car parts, lawn mowers, dead animals and lumber washed into my field. The 20-foot-high pile of trash remains.

Recently, I wrote to state and town officials, asking what they are doing to prevent future sewage spills. I also asked: “Has the town paid a fine? Is the lagoon monitored?” I received no response to my questions. The town has not built a new sewage cell or a berm, but it recently notified me that “land application” — that is, dumping sewage wastewater — will occur before Nov. 1, perhaps as a deterrent against future spills.

Developers have profited greatly as former hayfields like mine turn into subdivisions. Yet no one — not the developers, the town, the county or state — takes responsibility for what development does to the environment, the groundwater, the hapless new residents of those subdivisions or the rural neighbors.

This problem exists all over the West. How many towns have unpleasant but necessary facilities too close to homes because the town planners didn’t expect the town to get that big? Still, as towns grow, it’s their responsibility to provide safe sewage disposal, among other things. What can a law-abiding citizen do to protect health and property from the effects of irresponsible development? Apparently appealing to state and local officials is useless.

So here’s my warning: If you dream of moving to some charming rural town where you can get to know your neighbors, take a good look first at the sewage disposal system. Along with a folksy small-town welcome, you may also get your neighbors’ sewage. The website of the town of Hermosa, in Custer County, South Dakota, says the town is “not only a great place to visit, but a safe and welcoming place to raise your family.” Sorry, but I can’t agree.

Linda M. Hasselstrom is a contributor to Writers on the Range, the opinion service of High Country News. She has published 15 books of poetry and nonfiction and conducts writing retreats on her South Dakota ranch and online.

]]>No publisherWriters on the RangeOpinionPollutionSouth DakotaRanchingWaterAgriculture2016/10/13 02:15:00 GMT-6ArticleA helping hand for migrant studentshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/a-helping-hand-for-migrant-students
In the San Luis Valley, migrant workers build community around student success.Jasmine Rodriguez stood in a conference room in Washington D.C., before dozens of her peers. For an entire week last April, the 17-year-old high school junior, who’d come to the nation’s capital from Center, Colorado, had been debating student after student from around the country, defeating nearly every opponent. But this round made her uneasy: Her task was to argue against immigration. This was particularly difficult because Rodriguez, who grew up in Mexico, was surrounded by the children of migrant workers.

She argued the case, and felt great when she stepped off the podium. Afterwards, a woman from Georgetown Law School came up and gave her a business card, encouraging her to look into law schools someday.

Rodriguez was afforded the opportunity to travel to D.C. by the Migrant Education Program, which offers educational and social services to migrant worker families in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The program, which moved into a new building in Alamosa on Adams State University’s campus in September, is growing in popularity among the valley’s migrant worker population, and has recently begun to focus on getting migrant students geared up for college — even as its budget tightens at the state level.

Jasmine Rodriguez in her bedroom in Center, Colorado.

Nick Valdes

Farm work ranks among the most backbreaking, low-paying jobs in the U.S. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, most workers make between $10,000 and $12,500 a year, even though they often work overtime and face exposure to pesticides, heat, and frequent injuries. Most migrant workers are undocumented or working on temporary visas, and often fear speaking out about working conditions because they need to return each season.

According to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, seventh grade is the average highest grade completed by migrant workers. Their children often work on farms after school or during summers, and drop out to stay and work in the fields. Research suggests that migrant students often have the highest dropout rates of any demographic.

To track migrant students’ movements and outcomes, the federal government established the Migrant Education Program in 1966. The program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Education, provides states funding to ensure migrant students graduate high school or earn their GED to prepare them for college or employment. According to the Department of Education’s most recent data, 47 states now use it to find eligible children, track them in the public school system, and support them outside of school. More than 232,000 students are involved with the program nationally, which offers academic instruction, remediation, bilingual and multicultural instruction, counseling and guidance, health services, and preschool education. To qualify, students must move every three years to another school district with a parent who intends to work in seasonal or temporary agriculture, fishing, logging, or dairy production.

Colorado’s program, which has five regional offices that serve 4,500 students, focuses on math, graduation, reading, and school readiness. The program is particularly welcome in the San Luis Valley, one of the poorest regions in Colorado, whose robust agricultural industry makes it a popular destination for migrant workers. About 10,000 of the valley’s 40,000 residents are migrant seasonal laborers who work mostly in potato harvesting and on mushroom and lettuce farms.

Every year, the San Luis Valley branch of Colorado’s program, which receives about $1 million per year, serves about 500 students, ages 3 to 22, in 23 regional school districts. Most students are of Mexican descent, but a growing number of Central American families, as well as Nepalese and Burman students, participate as well. Each regional program must report data on their students’ movements to the state, and also tracks behavioral issues, grades, and attendance rates.

In the San Luis Valley’s program, six employees — including a parent liaison, data specialist, recruiters, and advocates — retain relationships with hundreds of migrant worker families, school administrators, and teachers. They offer everything from tutoring, to doctor and dentist referrals, to school supply drives, to a program that helps teachers and school districts better educate students from Mexico. The employees work long hours, often on weekends and evenings, going door to door to recruit and engage families; they also provide rides to make sure families attend events and tutoring sessions.

“We want to show the families, just because you are a migrant, you are still a part of society,” says Christina Vargas, the program’s administrative specialist. “You are human beings.”

Jasmine Rodriguez’s mother, Anita, appreciates the aid the program has provided her daughter. While Jasmine was in D.C, administrators sent Anita videos and photos of her daughter debating and exploring the city. The elder Rodriguez has also attended parent workshops to learn how to better communicate about immigration issues. Born in Colorado, Anita has been a migrant worker since she was 9 years old; during her childhood, her family traveled to and from Guanajuato, Mexico to dozens of farms across the South, Midwest, and West for months at a time. Anita and her husband, who was deported, raised their two daughters in Chihuahua, Mexico, and while they were young, she often traveled back and forth to work during harvest season.

A truck carries freshly harvested potatoes near Center, Colorado.

Nick Valdes

Three years ago, Jasmine Rodriguez was recruited to the Migrant Education Program when she arrived in the U.S. with her mother before eighth grade. Anita still works in the fields during potato harvest, which is why she pushes Jasmine to take advantage of every opportunity to travel. “I don’t want her to end up doing what I had to do, working in the fields,” Anita says. Now, her daughter mentors and tutors other students after school, takes college-level English courses, plays volleyball and soccer, and cheerleads.

This year, Rodriguez was also one of 30 students who participated in the new Migrant STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) Academy, which was developed with Adams State’s STEM program. This year, the students, who earn a college credit for participating, took courses on STEM careers, traveled to New Mexico to fly in gliders, and spent a week on campus, living in the dorms and being immersed in a college atmosphere — a particularly valuable experience, given that nearly all the students would be first-generation college attendees. As a result, says Jordan Witt-Araya, an advocate and program specialist, “They felt more confident about the things they had to do [to go to college], like finding financial aid, building relationships with their counselors and teachers, and thinking intentionally about internships and volunteer opportunities.”

In its new location on the Adams State campus, the Migrant Education Program’s cozy, cream-colored adobe house is filled with wooden floors, conference tables, and student artwork. There’s a roomy backyard with a patio, allowing the program to host events like free potlucks for migrant families. The Migrant Education Program also partners with separate government programs, like the College Assistance Migrant Program, which offers scholarships for one year for migrant students, as well as mentoring, tutoring, and financial help for school supplies.

But relying on federal funding begets challenges, mostly financial. Many students drop out after freshman year because they can’t afford tuition. According to program employees, budget cuts have made it difficult to provide school supplies, administer clothing donations, and offer rides to families. Over the next four years, the Migrant Education Program’s budget will be cut up to 10 percent at the national level because of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which goes into effect July 2017. It remains unclear how regional programs like the San Luis Valley’s will be affected.

A related issue is staff turnover. Building trust with families is critical to keeping them involved, and it takes a long time. Although the Migrant Education Program requires employees to be bilingual, the San Luis Valley program also want recruiters to speak Guatemalan to serve the area’s large population. Coupled with long hours and little pay, it’s a hard position to fill.

Jasmine Rodriguez said she feels lucky to be involved, but guilty that so many migrant students are left out. She’s also frustrated because she wants her peers to understand how much they can achieve, despite the stigma of being the child of a migrant worker.

Before she advanced to high school, she had to repeat eighth grade because the school didn’t think her English was strong enough. Now, ever more confident in her skills, Rodriguez wants to attend Colorado State in Fort Collins and become an immigration lawyer. “I want to use my languages,” she said. “I’m at more of an advantage because I’m bilingual.”

Lyndsey Gilpin is an editorial fellow at High Country News. She tweets@lyndseygilpin

]]>No publisherSmall towns, big changeEducationColoradoAgricultureSocial Justice2016/10/09 03:05:00 GMT-6ArticleThe afterlife of cottonhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/48.16/the-afterlife-of-cotton
Through the present and past of a border town, on the trail of literary legend José Revueltas.1.

Between 2010 and 2012, the Zetas cartel turned the Piedras Negras prison into a factory of uniforms, bulletproof jackets and desaparecidos, the Mexican journalist Diego Osorno claimed, not too long ago.i Near Piedras Negras, in the norteño state of Coahuila, lies the Don Martin Dam. The Zetas transformed it into an underwater narco-grave. Constructions are haunted spaces, anthropologist Saiba Varma once said in an animated talk about infrastructures. There are soft infrastructures, like hospitals and factories, and hard ones, like highways and bridges. Like dams. Hard, indeed. The dam is an amphitheater, solemn and noble. You can’t forget the bodies that constructed them, insisted Varma. Nor those that died there. You can’t forget, she kept on insisting. There is an underwater mass grave in the middle of the desert, near the Mexico-U.S. border. I insist.

2.

Construction on the Don Martin Dam officially began in January 1927 — only 10 years after the drafting of the Mexican Constitution officially ended the armed phase of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Located in the Juárez municipality in the northernmost corner of the state of Coahuila, very close to the border with the United States, the dam came to occupy the riverbed between the Salado and the Sabinas rivers, right in the midst of a ranch owned by one Martín Guajardo, hence its name. Engineers hired by the post-revolutionary regime believed that, with a reservoir of 1.13 million acre-feet of water, the Don Martin could irrigate some 73,155 acres of land, amending the ways of a climate always harsh and a sky determined to hold back rain. No clouds. No shade. No mercy. The dam was to turn vast tracts of land perceived as useless into veritable fields of agricultural production, or so voiced the engineers, the federal authorities, and the wandering farmers in constant lookout for a place to settle.

3.

In the beginning was water, and water was with the dam. The magic gift of the water with its secret drops of light, its hidden stars.

Water, however miraculous, was not enough. It never was or is. If farmers were to settle this zone and laborers to come by the hundreds, they needed more. They needed lands, and titles for those lands, as well as credit with which to acquire tools and seeds. Knowing better, the post-revolutionary cadre proceeded to open up the legal channels to facilitate both. Honoring the Colonization Law of 1926, the federal government began the land-distribution process around the Don Martin dam, establishing Irrigation District Number 4. Instead of ejidos — community-owned land recognized by the 1917 Constitution — however, the Mexican government supported an agrarian reform based on the distribution of small holdings of private property. They favored colonists, those members of an emerging middle class among farmers, over ejidatarios, peasants tied to communally based production, which, in their view, arrested the incursions of modernization in the northern fields.

Becoming a colonist, however, was not easy. Each potential colonist had to provide a down payment, 5 percent of the cost of the land, never a small feat for landless, unemployed and nomadic workers. And yet, the population of Estación Camarón, a campsite first developed in 1882, soon multiplied, thanks to the construction works of the Mexico-Laredo railroad in the neighboring state of Nuevo Leon. News of the land distribution and availability of credit from the Banco Agrícola quickly reached the sensitive ears of deportees from the United States and repatriated workers already living in Mexico, many of them experienced cotton pickers of southern Texas ranches. Agricultural laborers and landless peasants from southern Mexico also swarmed to the banks of saltpeter rivers, looking for a better life — a place they could call theirs.

That’s how my grandparents — an errant mine worker from San Luis Potosí who married a much younger woman who knew how to read and write — came to the region: Looking for land they could work and own, looking for their first real home. José María Rivera Doñes. Petra Peña. They had heard, like many others, of the promises of the Agrarian Reform and, although incredulous and mistrustful, they came. They had nothing to lose. They had land, and a new life, to gain.

But true stories are not to be told. True stories live before articulation and beyond hurt. They linger and survive precisely because they are hardly told — a gasp, the proverbial foot in the mouth, the slippage of drunkards. Or else because they are shared only in little pieces, filaments, sharp splinters flying through time. My family never sat down to talk about this. This story of cotton and work on the threshold of the desert was never intended to be known in that way — a foundational legacy, a well-structured source of pride, or a set of sentimental lessons for the future. Every now and then, at times by mistake, my father would say something over dinner, to which my mother would react, albeit briefly. A wince. A hint of a smile. The eyelid, when it closes down. Every now and then, at the end of a party, among alcohol-induced disorderly confessions, an uncle would say something, to which an aunt would retort, in code. No more comments added. As if protecting the rest of us — the younger ones already born in cities, far away from cotton fields — from that knowledge; or rather, as if protecting that knowledge from us.

We were at war, and in different armies. They knew that truth ought to be withheld from the enemy. Modernization was the name of this war. In its midst, our parents and grandparents lovingly looked at us as we ate or ran errands and they knew it: Upwardly mobile children would betray them. Parents who worked hard for their children would see in time how these same children, these apparently innocent children, would give them away.

They knew we’d leave the fields, this way of life, to become strangers or, worse, naive, perhaps even well-meaning, adversaries.

So hush.

True stories may only be told within other stories, and then only obliquely.

5.

A historic harvest of cotton in 1932 settled the question: The lands watered by the Don Martin Dam were to become cotton fields. The machinery of the state turned its wheels soon afterwards, striking deals with U.S. investors and employing the full power of the nascent post-revolutionary regime to break up long-held large estates. Cotton soon dominated the horizon in Mexicali, Baja California; in Delicias, Chihuahua; and in Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Some of the arriving cotton pickers were lucky. They got their acres of land and settled in, leaving their nomadic mores behind. Some had to try harder, and while waiting for an opportunity hired themselves as farmhands, creating a new, and eventually conflicting, hierarchy in the cotton fields. The latent antagonism must have been felt in the wind, wind from the north, as it battered the tents in the campsite. Pieces of ephemeral architecture. The night vault pierced by the light of a thousand stars.

The cotton fields dreamt of cities and, soon, cities emerged out of the white. Designed by engineers to ease the flow of goods, these cities materialized the dreams Jorge Luis Borges had not yet dreamt: circular ruins. On May 5,1933, colonists around the Don Martin Dam founded Anáhuac City, with total support from both the federal government and the National Commission of Irrigation, in lands overlapping with Estación Camarón and, on the other side of the tracks, Estación Rodríguez. There are few things sadder than the remnants of sudden and ephemeral opulence. Concentric, ample avenues envelop rounded plazas in whose centers once rose the legendary obelisk indicating the four cardinal corners of the world and the three vectors of time: past, present, future. The future above all.

José Revueltas came by horse to Estación Camarón in 1934. It was late March.

“The land in the north is whitish and hurtful,” he wrote in a letter he sent to his family in Mexico City while he remained in norteño lands. “Plains and deserts yet untamed, fierce, brimming with wild shrubs and sandpaper trees, with cactus that torment, torture our flesh, a symbol of all the Mexican land, Indian and in pain. Wild, wild is the wind, with no belay. Wind from the north.” ii

As he rode, Revueltas must have thought about the farmworkers’ strike he had heard about and immediately longed to join. The wild wind from the north, swirling around his head. The acacias. He was 19 years old. The sandpaper trees. You could see all of it from the window of our rental car: the shrubbery and the wind and the light like a dagger and Revueltas’ relentless gallop.

6.

This is what it’s all about: following in your footsteps 82 years later, comrade. You had not yet written, much less published, the novels and short stories that gained you a reputation as a revolutionary writer. You had not yet been a member of, and had not been expelled from, the ranks of the Mexican Communist Party. You had not become a detainee at the Islas Marias federal prison or, years later, after hundred of students were killed in the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, at the Lecumberri jail.

Two women follow in your footsteps, retracing them, to find you or to lose you. Forever.

A car. A lonely highway through the desert threshold. A small story of climate change.

Workers harvesting cotton in Torreón, Mexico (date unknown).

Eugene V. Harris, Clarence W. Sorensen Collection, American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

A man harvesting cotton in Torreón, Mexico (date unknown).

Eugene V. Harris, Clarence W. Sorensen Collection, American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

7.

In the beginning was unrest, unrest with the meek, who would inherit the earth.

Outside the full control of the post-revolutionary state, the land around the Don Martin Dam had been an ambiguously defined zone. Properly known as a steppe, but described by locals as a desert, it became a priority in the agenda of president Lázaro Cardenas — a champion of Agrarian Reform and labor organizing between 1934 and 1940 — as he tried to establish a clear border with the United States while taking back the autonomy of the region. There, those 15 hectares per family or that loan from the Banco de Crédito Ejidal were meant to uphold the fringes of the Mexican nation. A matter of national identity and national security, nothing more and nothing less. Impossible to walk through Anáhuac City without thinking about José María Rivera Doñes, picking cotton and taking his time every now and then to have a smoke. Impossible to walk through Anáhuac City without making out the figure of Petra Peña, working and giving birth to a child who would die in a year, and giving birth to my father afterwards. Impossible to walk through Anáhuac City without mulling over cotton and the Don Martin Dam, and those men and women looking into each other’s eyes.

This is the moment I believe in: José Revueltas meets the eyes of José María and Petra over a cotton field in the midst of a strike.

There are moments that reverberate over the earth. And they stretch. Until they catch us. On a highway.

8.

Revueltas explored much of his key experience in Estación Camarón in El luto humano, his second novel, which was published in 1943 and translated into English twice.iii The agrarian experiment has already failed when the novel opens: A small group of impoverished peasants witnesses the death of a child, and death — the presence of death, the bitterness of death, the sweetness of death — impregnates their surroundings. Repeated flashbacks let the reader see and feel the cotton fields, especially the labor that transformed tracts of dry land into meadows of white gold.

Revueltas did not miss the buzzing of tractors or the dignified demeanor of strikers as they quietly sang a melody while blocking the waterways. He documented the farmworkers’ demands for fair wages and fulfillment of those promises of landownership. Urgent telegrams exchanged between local and federal authorities and, later, between unions and other leftist organizations and the government itself, not only confirmed Revueltas’ participation in the strike, but also showed the lively nature of rural communism in northern Mexico and its volatile, conflictive relationship with the state. Using two or three adjectives in a row, and more if the situation called for it, Revueltas made patent the individual and social drama triggered by cotton as it established a paradoxical yet utterly productive alliance with the post-revolutionary regime. For cotton is generous, and cruel. Cotton is cruel.

9.

Cotton has been as fundamental in the north of Mexico as corn in the center and south of the country. Many norteño cities are, in fact, the offspring of cotton. Both the drastic demographic increase and the remarkable economic growth of northern Mexico are historically related to the expansion of cotton fields. As much as in the American South, cotton marked the economy, the landscape, and the social mores of the Mexican side, albeit in very different ways. Rather than producing plantations based on slave labor, norteño cotton, distributed in small private landholdings under the supervision of the state, meant both social mobility and adherence to the post-revolutionary regime. Resilience, resourcefulness and hard work, characteristics norteños are prone to associate with themselves, all appear in the ways in which farmers first approached the state, often instigating agrarian reform initiatives rather than merely responding to them. Indeed, even though cotton production was state-controlled along the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, collaborative work practices generated by communities themselves, as well as a deep attachment to the land, were central to the high yields of those early cotton harvests.

But as forensic architect Eyal Weizman has argued, “shifting the climatic threshold is also shifting the ‘nomos of the earth.’ ”iv As the colonization project evolved, the land, exhausted by monoculture, eventually gave up. By the 1960s, soil erosion, excessive use of fertilizers, and a range of invincible plagues had brought the cotton experiment to a trepid end. Sorghum replaced cotton, then maquiladoras replaced sorghum, in rapid succession.

And then drug trafficking. And now pure violence. Numbers tell a terrifying story: About 80,000 desaparecidosnationwide in 15 years of the so-called War on Drugs. Many of them in the same lands where cotton once bloomed.

You can’t forget those that die here, Varma, the anthropologist, had told us in a conference far away. Infrastructures are sacred spaces, she insisted. There are bodies under the water. There are rotting bodies under the water. A dam.

The letter “Z” (for Zetas drug cartel) is seen painted on a hill next to the toll booth at the freeway between Monterrey and Torreón, in the Mexican state of Coahuila. 2010.

Tomas Bravo/Reuters

Women take part in a search for missing relatives near the village of La Union on the outskirts of Torreón in the Mexican state of Coahuilla. The Zetas cartel, which arrived here in 2007, has made Torreón one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico.

Daniel Becerril /Reuters

10.

Living only by a miracle is what we do here, says the man who guides us towards the center of the plaza of Anáhuac City. One step. Another step. A foot doesn’t walk alone, it joins other feet. … No one remembers anymore, he says when the question is about cotton. Plough. Sow. Water. Weed. Harvest. What is that all about? The man smiles when he points out the dam in the photographs hanging from the green walls of the library. The dam is an amphitheater, solemn and noble. In Human Mourning, cement trucks disrupt, hammers speak a precise language. Everything is covered in iron music.

Engineers, contractors, masons, mechanics, carpenters, they fill everything with an intense, vibrant murmur, as if it were more than a dam, as if instead of a dam, it was a statue, or something just as beautiful, chiseled to adorn the gray landscape.

Something just as beautiful.

The dam has feet, and a dark skeleton. The dam is draped in curtains like clothes. Full of bodies, the dam is a hyper-body now. An aquatic cemetery. A dejected Atlantis on acid.

11.

But Estación Camarón doesn’t exist anymore, the man insists. Affected or delighted, it doesn’t make a difference.

The strike disrupted the irrigation system ... in an instant everything died.

Estación Camarón is a pile of nothing over nothing. A strike is at the margin of silence, but still silent.

Rubble, that’s what you’d find there. Less than rubble.

12.

The census shows that Estación Camarón has had between 12 and three inhabitants throughout the 21st century.

The most intimate of the ruins are our bones.

13.

We got to get out of there. Out of here. The decision is made abruptly. Two stateless women, two women without an army, maybe without a country, drive back fast. We got to get out. Two women suddenly alone. Fear is a herd of wild boars that roots around on the earth’s surface. Fear is in the voice, in the hands gripping the steering wheel, in the unease. A black pickup approaches in the rearview mirror. A state of emergency: the fear of being in a car on a highway that literally goes nowhere. The fear of being closely followed by history. Natividad — one of the main characters in Human Mourning — had a vision of everything that was to happen. Did Natividad see us then? On the trail of those that worked the fields, and joined a strike no one remembers, and then escaped? Did he see José María and Petra right when they tucked their children and belongings in a horse-drawn wagon and took the road?

José Revueltas.

General Archive of the Nation; Brothers Fund Mayo; and Ediciones Era

14.

Natividad, José Revueltas wrote, had a vision of all this. He did. José María and Petra had a vision of this. They did. Two stateless women alone on a highway in front of an advancing army. A surreal atmosphere, marked off and secret. We have to get out of here. The silence of the underwater mass grave — interrupted by the delicate bubbles of the dead.

Cristina Rivera Garza is a distinguished professor of Hispanic Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Houston and the author of No One Will See Me Cry. Recent works include La imaginación pública, a poetry book, and Los muertos indóciles, essays on writing at the crossroads of violence and digital technology.

This story is based on documents found at the Archivo Histórico de Nuevo León, located in Monterrey, Nuevo León, México. Roadtrip with Claudia Sorais Castañeda. Phrases in italics belong to José Revueltas. Human Mourning in translation by Aviva Kana with Suzanne Jill Levine. Some sections of this text were written originally in English, while some others were translated from Spanish into English by myself, and still others by Aviva Kana with Suzanne Jill Levine.

"Balance" shows a connection between humans and other lifeforms on The World Wall, a traveling mural installation.

Judith Baca

And the woman fled into the desert, there to be cared for, for 1,260 days, in a place which God had prepared for her.

—Revelation 12:6

It is over a decade since I left Chicago to live in the Chihuahuan Desert.

My home sits on a mesa. From the mistress bedroom, windows facing east, I have a view of the ­Franklin Mountains. The Franklins comprise a small range that extends from the state line of New Mexico through El Paso, ­Texas. They may well be over a billion years old.

Sitting on my bed, laptop propped, I have watched those low mountains throughout entire days, from sunrise to sunset, during heavy rains, obscured by dust storms, and throughout many clear days. As the mesa declines, there are the verdant crops of small farms in summer and, farthest below, the town of Anthony. It serves as the dividing line between New Mexico and Texas. To the south is El Paso and to the north are the colonias — villages that lead to Las Cruces.

Before the few pine trees around the house were nearly all annihilated by blight, there was a symphony of birds’ songs from dawn until dusk. When I had more trees, I watched the myriad of birds headed to nest and settle in for the night. The same chickadee woke me each day before sunrise. And throughout the day, chirps did indeed fill my heart with song. The light of the desert accompanies me, too. There’s nothing like it. In summer, so bright and combined with the heat, however, the sun makes you feel as if you’ve had your eyelids peeled back. I swear there is such a thing as eyeball burn. But mostly the light seems to play tricks on you. See the way it hits the wall there? See how it has changed the room since the morning? Outdoors, all of desert nature is in high relief. Periodically, you can hear the whistle of the Rio Grande and El Paso Railroad Co. trains rumbling through at a distance.

One warm night I was driving up the mesa to my casita. Suddenly my eye caught the shimmering of small lights out on a field, like a slow flurry of large fireflies. Along the dirt road, old cars were parked. Here and there a woman stood outside rocking a child. It was onion-picking season. Because of the excruciating heat, people were hired to work at night. The fireflies were miners’ lights strapped around their foreheads. At night, milder temperatures eased the backbreaking repetitive effort of pulling onions out of the earth, though you might also run across a rattler, scorpion, spider or other nighttime prowler.

Although before this recent life I was mostly a city dweller, I do have early memories that were triggered by those field workers. My mother’s younger sister was widowed very young. Tía Flora was born in Mexico City but moved near the border of Laredo and lived in Nuevo Laredo in her late teens, joining my mother and their grandparents, who had migrated earlier. The sisters were orphans. My aunt’s second husband, a card-carrying Tejano, came from a farmworker family. They migrated throughout the year following the crops. Every summer they made it to Indiana, which is close to Chicago, where I am from, and they stayed in the labor camp. From the visits we paid to see my Tía Flora’s in-laws in summer during tomato season in Indiana, I vividly recall the conditions that Mexicans and American Mexicans experienced in the camps. While picking the fruits and vegetables that would stock grocery shelves and would be sent to canneries (where more Mexicans worked) and eventually reached American tables, the workers existed in squalor.

I don’t like to think of those labor-camp visits. Although I was just a kid, una escuincle of 6 or 8 years of age, not knowing anything from anything else, growing up in a deteriorated neighborhood in Chicago that was about to get torn down, I knew the place that family was staying in was perpetually dark. It was a scary, dismal place for a child. A bulb hung from the ceiling in the middle of the room. I don’t recollect any windows. There was no refrigeration and no outlets for fans. Maybe six adults slept in that room. In Chicago, in our flat, we had big rats that chased the housecat. Sometimes kerosene ran out on winter nights and we slept with layers of clothes on, but the labor camp brought Mexican daily life to a different ­dimension.

At the labor camp, as opposed to the ranch house, there was no doubt it was a Mexican world. Perhaps there was a hot plate for the doña’s tortilla-making, my tía’s traveling mother-in-law. As for running water, I remember a large communal something that in my mind’s faded memory looks like a trough. In my head, I hear people laughing at that trough as they come with their bushels of picked tomatoes.

The workers were paid by the bushel. Children were paid less than adults for the same bushel. I see the sun-grazed faces of brown children, the faces of my older half-siblings among them. My mother sent them, around 11 or 13 years old, to work for a few weeks in summer. Instead of going away to summer camp for free with Jane Addams’ Hull House, they were picking fruit for a few cents a bushel.

Ana Castillo is reunited with her son.

Courtesy Ana Castillo

I set upon a novel (eventually it became Give It to Me) to restore humor to my soul. With the startling red-orange sun making its ritual descent behind the flat horizon each night, while below in town twinkling lights went on in the Escándalo Night Club, I stayed at my computer and tried to find the funny in living. While I worked hard at writing humor, my life was not funny, not even in the ironic way one might say, “Funny, you should say that. …”

To begin with, Mi’jo, several years out of college, was in jail. Since I had a cousin who served a sentence of 21 years, the two-year penalty my son received seemed merciful to a mother’s heart. That summer, midway through his incarceration, it felt like 21 years.

In the evenings, after a day’s work, I took advantage of the government-granted privilege of communication and sent my only child long electronic missives. I could write to him as much and as often as I wanted and not have to wait long for a response. Moreover, I could tell him everything that was on my mind. The emails were being read, of course, but what did a brokenhearted mother have to hide? With utter self-indulgence, I didn’t hold back the hurt, confusion, and anger I’d had over his decisions. All the ranting may have done little to brighten my son’s days, but it became a kind of release for me before bed.

At times, my son’s and my exchanges were not fraught with futile regrets or reproaches but filled with discussions about writing, books and music. From prison he began to write for my new arts and literary zine, La Tolteca. He won a writing award from PEN designated for the incarcerated. It wouldn’t go on his résumé later on — he had enough going against him with a record — but a writer getting an award from PEN is worth noting. He was in his own hell that summer. The inescapable heat and loneliness and the anguish of my son’s nonsensical loss of freedom meant I was in a purgatory of my own.

That summer, I stayed at my desk until late when sleep finally came to me. Mi’jo’s incarceration, for unarmed robbery, tormented me, and I thought a lot about the bizarre 10-year journey of Odysseus while his mother dwelled as a ­shadow in Hades.

My son was no hero, to be sure. He was born to no throne. Nevertheless, I would hang in there and wait out his absence.

My understanding of the story of The Odyssey is limited. (Unlike my son, who read Homer in high school, I graduated from a secretarial school for girls that stressed typing speed above all else.) I have no formal studies in the classics. Nevertheless, from a rudimentary understanding, the story of Odysseus, like most mythology, intrigued me.

Anticlea, the mother of Odysseus, gave up on her son’s return from the Trojan War; she died of grief. My son was no hero, to be sure. He was born to no throne. Nevertheless, I would hang in there and wait out his absence.

In myths, I have searched for the cultural seeds that make up men, women and other wondrous creatures. In reading the story of Odysseus, I tried to understand how in every journey a man or woman was both hero and anti-hero at varying times.

Years before, I taught a feminist class at a university using Joseph Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey to becoming savior or king. It was dismaying or perhaps, in the end, challenging, that I had to adjust women’s history on such a journey. Women did not share the linear narrative to leader (or failed potential leader). Instead, female archetypes had three life stages: lovely maiden, fertile mother, and (sterile, hunchbacked, saggy, wild-haired, banished-from-the-village-to-a-hut-where-she-concocted-poisons-to-harm-men-unworthy-of-love-although-wise-and-yet-despised-for-her-wisdom) crone. Me, in other words.

Looking around, there I was, living in isolation at the edge of the world, which is what desert, sea and sky have been to us for ages. I didn’t concoct spells like the village witch, but I did enjoy cool herbal tea. As for the bad body image older women were presented with in myths and fairy tales, I swam every day, rode horseback, and was on a dark green veggie-juice diet. I was not entirely something out of Grimm’s fairy tales. Nevertheless, the role of mothers in myth (and now for me in reality), which seemed to be standing on the sidelines, wringing our hands watching the lives of grown children unfold, seemed unavoidable.

Anticlea got very little time in the imagination of the patriarchs. In The Odyssey, she has died — but not of old age or illness. It is speculated by some that she took her own life after being told the lie that her son was dead. I sympathized.

There were instances during that period when patriarchy no less affected me. To begin with, when a child fails, at any stage, in any way, eyes turn to the mother. The chorus (certain family members, immediate community, society in general), with few exceptions, appeared to point fingers at me, as if to demand my banishment. After all, to me had been left the duty to produce a king or a hero. I imagined the whispers — what more could anyone expect from a woman who left a husband and who, furthermore, behaved as if she had no use for men? How dare she think she could walk about and be as liberated as any man? No wonder her son turned out such a disappointment. What male role model had he had? These toxic thoughts echoed in my skull the whole of his incarceration.

When I wasn’t sensing that others blamed me, I blamed myself.

Generations of women hold candles, depicting the beginning of a society’s movement toward peace, in a painting titled "Triumph of the Hearts."

Judith Bac

There are military surveillance planes from the White Sands Missile Range or Fort Bliss that fly overhead occasionally, intruding on the isolation. When the mares of my modest (near-barren) ranchito are let out of their corral, there is nothing more exciting than the sounds of their hooves against the sandy floor as they run free. Sometimes winds carry the yells of the neighbors playing basketball; I hear the thump-thump of dribbling and the banter of boys becoming men. There used to be a small grove of pecan trees next door to me. The tree keepers who resided in a trailer on that land would every now and then raise a ruckus with a family party. Mexican bandaor norteño music played. Kids shouted from an inflatable bounce house, drunk male voices carried over, everything blaring against the stark light of the desert until dark. Disrupting my peace and the illusion that there I was free from gauche society, it all used to annoy me. Then the lovely grove went dry — the drought. The family moved out and their decrepit trailer was razed. Now, when I think of it all, I miss the vitality of those families; they lived unfettered by pretenses. I don’t miss their dogs.

The stark light fades to black slowly, leaving in its wake dogs barking and the occasional howling of coyotes. The dogs lie about all day, and after dark join the canine choir throughout the mesa. In winter (a winter that seems to grow longer and colder each year), they come inside and throw themselves down in front of the wood-burning stove in the living room. If permitted by the smallest one that sleeps with me, they sneak into my bedroom and loll around the bed. We all listen to the barking of less fortunate dogs left outside and howling coyotes until we go to sleep in the lonesome quiet of the desert.

Ana Castillo is a celebrated poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and scholar. Born and raised in Chicago, she is the author of So Far From God, The Guardians and Peel My Love like an Onion.

]]>No publisherDesertsAgricultureBooksEssaysLatinosPeople & PlacesGenderSouthwest2016/09/19 02:45:00 GMT-6ArticleIf you can’t beat the weeds, eat themhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/if-you-cant-beat-the-weeds-eat-them
How nature — and marmots — thwarted a plan for an urban garden.One of the advantages of moving from Montana to Spokane, Washington, was the opportunity to grow my own food. The mild climate and rainfall would make gardening much easier, or so I believed. With this in mind, I purchased an old house on an acre lot in the middle of the city. The property had been neglected for years, and in clearing away the brush, I uncovered seven apple trees along with a cherry and a plum tree.

With five small ponds on the property, I envisioned an urban permaculture project. I would collect rainwater off the roof, plant more fruit trees, and add strawberries and raspberries. The front yard would fill with herbs and perennials, while the back would become one vast vegetable garden. I had big plans.

But first, I needed to deal with the weeds. The hillside below the house, where I envisioned a flourishing orchard, was already covered by a fast-growing invader called “tree of heaven” (Ailanthus altissima). It felt more like hell as I spent the first year clearing out all of the trees and yanking up the knapweed.

A mature garlic mustard plant.

Fletcher Wildlife Garden

Come spring, I noticed a vibrant green forb carpeting the now sunny hillside where the tree of heaven had once grown. I soon identified my new arrival as garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata). With a name like that, I thought, what’s not to like? Except that I received notice from the county weed board that it, too, was an invasive species that I was obligated to remove.

The good news was that I figured that, since I had to pull it, I might as well eat it, and garlic mustard soon appeared in my quiche, omelets, stir fry and pesto.

[RELATED:https://www.hcn.org/issues/361/17432/]

At last, with the backyard cleared, I enthusiastically planted onions, kale, carrots and lettuce, and watched in anticipation as they grew green in the warm April sun. Then the marmots arrived.

I learned that Spokane is known for its urban marmots, aka “whistle pigs,” which tuck themselves into nearly every rock and cranny in this valley, which is underlain by basalt. Though these large plump rodents are native, marmots have adapted all too well to the city and its abundant food sources — including my garden. And the urban coyotes, it seems, prefer dumpsters and dog food to making an honest living keeping the marmots in check.

By the time I acquired a live-capture trap and found I could use the garlic mustard as bait, the marmots had completely decimated my garden. I now had a big yard, devoid of knapweed to be sure, but also of nearly everything else except for lambsquarter (Chenopodium album), another nutritious leafy green. Then a strange, ground-hugging plant began spreading across the entire yard. After many hours of pulling it out, I decided to look it up and found it was purslane (Portulaca oleracea), also edible. Another weed found its way into sandwich wraps and salads.

All summer I’d also been actively sniping off an annoying spiky shrub that kept growing out of the stone wall lining my driveway. I noticed that this same plant formed an impenetrable briar patch in the gaps between the trees of heaven. But just like the tree of heaven, the more I cut it back, the more it grew. Then, come fall, I noticed the briar patch was full of small red berries — goji berries (Lycium barbarum) — which make a great addition to smoothies.

Meanwhile, the marmots had eaten everything but the tomatoes and zucchini, birds had picked all the cherries, squirrels had feasted on all the plums, and my apple trees were infected with coddling moths. Oh, and duckweed and cattails took over the ponds. Nature, it seemed, was determined to thwart all my efforts at gardening.

As I stared at my yard, which was filled with plants and animals — albeit all the wrong species — it occurred to me that this city lot was not a blank canvas upon which I could paint my own version of a garden, but rather its own thriving, hybrid ecosystem. Native and exotic species were forging a relationship in the middle of a human-dominated cityscape.

I conceded defeat. I gave up farming and embraced gathering. My harvest cycle now goes something like this: In the spring, I collect the leafy greens of garlic mustard, dandelions and lambs quarter. In summer, I collect purslane and cattails, whose young stalks are quite tasty. Come fall, I harvest goji berries and the leaves and seeds of mullein, another exotic species. I even discovered that the bark of tree of heaven can be used to treat malaria, should climate change bring the disease to eastern Washington. Still, I have to admit that I miss growing and harvesting lettuce, carrots and all the rest.

I wonder how marmots taste.

Greg Gordon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, the opinion service of High Country News. He writes in Spokane, Washington.

]]>No publisherWriters on the RangeOpinionFoodAgricultureWashington2016/09/13 03:00:00 GMT-6ArticleHow do you beat hunger and food waste? Try composthttp://www.hcn.org/articles/how-do-you-beat-hunger-and-food-waste-try-compost
Reunity turns restaurant scraps into soil — and connects Santa Fe with rural farms in the process.“Food waste is killing the planet.”

So said Mother Jones Magazine in September 2013. It’s estimated that our national food waste, stored in landfills, contributes as many climate change-causing greenhouse gases as the emissions from 33 million cars. In Santa Fe, Reunity Resources set out to do something about that. A small company co-owned by Juliana and Tejinder Ciano, Reunity formed first to collect food scraps for bio-diesel. By 2012, the limitations of bio-diesel became clear, and the Cianos turned to the idea that collecting food waste from restaurants and public schools could furnish a fledging composting business. It took eighteen months for Reunity to win the contract from the City of Santa Fe to collect commercial food scraps.

Today, almost three years later, the composting initiative is creating enough topsoil to mulch nearly two acres per month. Reunity donates the compost to Santa Fe Community Farm, where the composting project is based; in turn, the farm donates 70 percent of its food crops to local hunger initiatives, Food Depot and Kitchen Angels. Farmers in rural communities buy the Reunity compost and attest to its impacts on plant growth and carbon sequestration in the ground. Ellen Berkovitch followed Juliana Ciano around for a couple of months with a microphone, and has the story.

]]>No publisherSmall towns, big changeAgricultureFoodClimate ChangeNew MexicoAudio2016/09/09 04:05:00 GMT-6ArticleNew Mexican farmers struggle to stay on the landhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/new-mexican-farmers-struggle-to-stay-on-the-land
Can a tax break keep New Mexico’s struggling farmers from selling out?Louis Romero has been through two knee replacements, a heart attack and a bout with cancer. At 73, he's not up for farm chores any more.

Romero and his wife, Emily, live on 5 acres just north of Taos, New Mexico, that were once part of a larger family farm. Emily and her three sisters inherited the land from their dad, who worked as a school bus driver mornings and afternoons and dedicated the rest of his time to the farm.

“I have such an emotional tie to this land,” Emily Romero says, tears welling up behind her wire-frame glasses as she recalls endless hours spent shucking peas and churning butter.

The Romeros continued to run cattle on their property until they were forced to sell the herd during a drought a decade ago. Their kids have shown no interest in working the land. Some can't even stand the smell of fresh manure. As a result, the land has sat idle for years.

Emily and Louis Romero own about 5 acres just north of Taos that was once part of a much larger family farm. The Romeros and hundreds of other Taos County landowners are facing a huge spike in property taxes because the land is no longer being used for agriculture. An effort is underway to give a tax break to those who don’t develop their land, leaving it open for future generations of farmers.

Katharine Egli/The Taos News

For the Romeros and other families, state tax law makes idling land an expensive proposition. Because the family's property was once used for agriculture, it was one of about 6,000 parcels that enjoyed a longtime property tax break. But in 2013, the county began cracking down. The assessor's office hired a team to inspect fields and irrigation ditches, property by property, for signs of farming activity. By the end of 2015, they found that more than half of the 1,000 parcels inspected were not in production.

When an old family loses ag status, the county adjusts their property value and corresponding tax to the market rate, which has been inflated by a wave of affluent retirees and second homeowners. The result for many landowners has been a sudden and often astronomical spike in taxes. For example, in the desirable Des Montes area — which is now home to notable property owners like actress Julia Roberts and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld —one parcel that lost ag status saw its yearly tax go from $576 a year to over $3,000. On average, properties that lost ag status in 2014 saw their tax bills go up 143-fold.

As the reassessment continues, many locals fear that jacking up taxes on arable land will force longtime owners off their land. If that land, once sold, is subsequently developed rather than farmed, it could spell the end of a centuries-old farming tradition that's at the center of the region's cultural identity.

The trend isn't unique to New Mexico. Across the West, old farm and ranch owners have been pushed out as development overtakes rural areas. But some states have taken steps to protect farmland — even unproductive properties —from development. Whether New Mexico can learn from other Western states and adopt a similar strategy may determine the fate of families like the Romeros — and the future of agriculture in Taos County.

It's undeniable that agriculture in Taos County is nowhere as vibrant as it once was. But for those who hope to see a widespread resurgence, the protection of agricultural land for future use is a top priority.

In 2015, Allison co-authored a report with Colorado State University that compared tax law across the Intermountain West. The report concluded that offering tax incentives for preserving open space — not just active farms —could lead to more sustainable agriculture and prevent the kind of tax crisis facing Taoseños.

“The greatest threat to agriculture right now is the loss of land to development,” Allison says, noting that it's not only the real estate but the water rights that are being sold off piecemeal. “By creating an open space option, we hold some of that land in reserve for future generations of farmers.”

For inspiration, some in northern New Mexico are looking to states like Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Texas and Washington, which all have some kind of open space protection written into their tax laws. Allison points to Washington, which passed a law in 1970 that gave a tax break not just to active farms, but to parcels of open space as well. Under the Open Space Taxation Act, an owner makes a formal application with their county commission or town council asking for an open space classification. Inspectors grade a property using 25 separate categories that include attributes like aquifer protection, wildlife habitat, and allowing public access.

If approved, the land can be valued as low as land that meets the standards of active agricultural land — sometimes just $1 an acre. The owner must agree to keep the land undeveloped for at least 10 years, or face back taxes and an additional penalty.

Bill Bernstein oversees the open space program for Washington's King County, which includes Seattle and more rural areas to the east. Bernstein says he's seeing a wave of aging farmers looking to the open space program as a way to hang on to their land in the face of mounting pressure to develop or sell out.

“It's a fallback that gives some flexibility for these multi-generational owners,” says Bernstein. He adds that it's not uncommon for a farm to go out of production and enter the open space program, then resume operations when another family member steps in or a new owner takes over. Farm advocates and conservationists in Taos think that model would work well in New Mexico. “It would give people some breathing room,” says Kristina Ortez de Jones, executive director of the Taos Land Trust and member of a local group that's trying to revive the county's agriculture. “We need that tool in a community like ours, which is so poor but has really high property values.”

To protect local agricultural acres, Lesli Allison of the Western LandownersAlliance is proposing the “ New Mexico Land and Resource Reserve” that would create a new tax category for open space around the state. Although they haven't decided on firm numbers yet, Allison says taxes for open space properties would be higher than taxes for active farms, but significantly lower than market rate. Qualifying properties must also have agricultural water rights, or have been designated as agricultural within the last three years. Owners would be required to maintain existing irrigation infrastructure and keep the land free of noxious weeds. If a property were pulled out of the program for development, the owner would pay a penalty.

If and when such a bill is introduced, it's likely to be controversial. Allison says the most common critique is that giving fallow farmland a tax break is akin to offering complacent landowners a free ride. There are also worries that developers could find loopholes to shelter themselves from higher taxes.

]]>No publisherSmall towns, big changeAgricultureNew MexicoEconomyGrowth & Sustainability2016/09/06 11:40:00 GMT-6ArticleHow to feed the masses in small-town Americahttp://www.hcn.org/articles/how-to-feed-the-masses-in-small-town-america
New business models bring food to towns too small for big box stores.Ten years ago, plagued by equipment failures and increasingly sluggish sales, the only grocery store in tiny Walsh, Colorado, closed its doors. But the town’s 600 residents, suddenly facing a 40-mile round trip for food, didn’t despair. Instead, they pooled their money and reopened the historic Walsh Community Grocery Store, a fixture in their town since 1928, as a community-owned store.

Today, the store is turning a profit, and has just one payment left on a $160,000 loan it used to restock and remodel. The shop’s strategy of combining smart community organizing and traditional business acumen is a model for other tiny towns struggling to maintain local grocery stores, even as dollar stores and their frozen wares take over main streets throughout rural America. Roughly 6,000 dollar stores have opened in the U.S. since 2010, according to the retail research firm Conlumino. For at least one chain, Dollar General, the large majority are in towns of 20,000 people or less — places too small for big box stores, like Wal-Mart, but perfect for a dollar store’s slightly smaller shop.

In rural communities, grocery stores — part economic driver, part community builder, and part food supplier — are key institutions, according to an analysis by the Center for Rural Affairs. But keeping them alive isn’t easy. Profit margins are low in the grocery business, and most chain stores accumulate earnings through volume. At small-scale stores like the one in Walsh, the limited clientele means limited sales and, perhaps, bankruptcy. An analysis of rural food cooperatives by the University of Wisconsin found that the most successful stores were the sole grocery store within 20 to 30 miles — in other words, the ones that faced the least competition.

Katherine Egli

The arrival of dollar stores, and the closure of local grocers, can turn rural areas into food deserts. When fresh food doesn’t reach the people who need it, or when it’s too expensive for most residents to afford, the result can be a cycle of malnutrition, poor health, and poverty.

Walsh’s grocery, however, is thriving, thanks in large part to meticulous inventory management. (Think mark-ups, though still within reason, for coveted fresh produce, and steep discounts for staples like milk.) The store’s profits fold back into the business, which has 18 mostly part-time employees. Revenue from shares issued to townspeople at $50 each, plus a no-interest loan from the Southeast Colorado Power Association, helped get the business off the ground in 2006. Once the loan is paid off, Jones said, shareholders may start receiving an annual dividend. This year, for the first time in a half-decade, the store posted a profit during summer months.

“I was skeptical when we started,” said Clarence Jones, chairman of the Walsh Community Grocery Store board and a former Walsh mayor. “But people were so enthusiastic that it became a reality pretty quick.”

Community-owned stores aren’t the only fix for towns struggling to retain their food purveyors. Small towns have experimented with cooperatives, public-private partnerships, school-based stores and even nonprofit organizations. And perhaps no community has broken more ground than Saguache, Colorado, a town of 500 that lies 35 miles from the nearest full-service grocery store.

A volunteer at the 4th Street Food Store in Saguache, Colorado, prepares fresh local carrots for the shelves.

Katherine Egli

Saguache’s grocer depends on an off-the-wall nonprofit model that blends revenue from a thrift store with health food products. Cofounder Marge Hoglin, a semi-retired former journalist and small business owner who bought the property with a partner for $45,000 in 2012, today employs three part-time workers at the 4th Street Food Store, where she keeps produce prices low by maintaining close relationships with local growers. The thrift store, with its donated, free inventory, generates enough revenue to cover overhead costs, subsidizing the health foods operation. She is also the only retailer in the county to participate in the state’s Double Up Food Bucks program, which allows people to use $20 in food stamps to purchase $40 of produce. Revenues have doubled since the store opened, said Hoglin, who runs the nonprofit as a volunteer.

“I wanted to find a community where I could give back and feel like I have a purpose and a mission,” she said. “I get a lot of satisfaction from feeling like I’ve made a contribution here.”

Marge Hoglin, manager of the 4th Street Food Store

Katherine Egli

Hoglin’s sacrifice isn’t unusual. The success of many rural grocery stores depends on altruism from owners, managers and employees—people who recognized that conventional grocery stores weren’t serving their towns and sacrificed time, energy and personal capital to bring about change. (In Saguache, for instance, the only other retail food source is a glorified gas station convenience store.) As with many small-town institutions, the survival of grocery stores may be less related to sales and profit margins than on selfless, civic-minded communities.

“It’s not so much about the job,” said Donald Rutherford, a Walsh native who moved back to care for his aging parents and now manages the Walsh Community Grocery Store. “It’s about the community.”

]]>No publisherSmall towns, big changeAgriculturePublic healthGrowth & SustainabilityEconomyColorado2016/09/05 04:10:00 GMT-6ArticleIs farming a public service? http://www.hcn.org/articles/is-farming-public-service
To build a new generation of farmers, one nonprofit wants states to forgive student loans.Casey Holland didn’t decide to pursue a farming career until she started an internship with a food justice organization during her last year at the University of New Mexico. After graduating in 2012, she hopped around local farms, apprenticing until she found a home on Red Tractor Farm, a small vegetable spread in the South Valley of Albuquerque.

Today, Holland wants to buy land in Albuquerque and run her own farm. But that goal feels like a pipe dream. Because of her high student loan debt, she lacks sufficient credit to even think about buying land or starting a business. When she asked for a loan to launch her own farming operation, she received an immediate “no” from the bank before she could finish her pitch.

The U.S. is in desperate need of young, ambitious farmers like Holland. The average age of an American farmer is 58, and only 6 percent are under the age of 35. The incoming agricultural workforce isn’t even coming close to replacing the aging one. And losing independent farms has consequences: When large corporations buy up arable land, rural and low-income communities can lose access to local food, and consumers grow increasingly distant from the produce on their table. That transition has already begun: According to the National Young Farmers Coalition, a nonprofit that connects young farmers across the country, the number of beginning farmers fell by 20 percent between 2007 and 2012. One of the biggest reasons is because new farmers can’t afford it or receive a loan.

A young farmer works in the field.

Kacey Kropp

“There’s so many of us who want to do more, to be full-time farmers and impact communities,” says Holland. “But the burden of student loan payments makes it unviable.”

To develop the next generation of producers, the Young Farmers Coalition is now pushing Congress and individual state legislatures to take a big step: forgiving farmers’ student loans. Their hope is that loan forgiveness will help farming become a more viable option to career option for college students, and benefit farmers in areas where attending college may have previously been financially prohibitive. After setting up relatively successful loan forgiveness programs in New York and Wisconsin, the coalition is now campaigning in Western states such as New Mexico.

The coalition’s goal is to add farmers to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, a federal initiative launched in 2007 that incentivizes students to enter professions that provide a public good but do not pay enough to manage student loan debt. Qualifying professions include teachers, nurses, doctors, public interest attorneys, government employees, and nonprofit workers. After repaying what they can afford for 10 years, their federal student loan balance is forgiven.

Eric Hansen, policy analyst for the coalition, says including farmers on the public service list is important because the challenges of their profession often make it difficult to repay loans. Farmers depend on credit to get started and purchase land, livestock, and equipment like tractors and greenhouses. The average annual incomefrom agriculture for beginning farmers is just over $2,000, according to the Department of Agriculture, although new farmers also make more money from other sources of revenue. Meanwhile, the average cost of land is around $3,000 per acre.

Those difficult dynamics helped make the case in New York, which started a program to forgive new farmers’ loans in 2014. The state’s Young Farmers Student Loan Forgiveness Incentive Program offers recent state school graduates grants of up to $50,000 if they farm for at least five years.

Since New York can only afford to give out 10 grants a year, the program isn’t about to dramatically increase the state’s agricultural workforce. But for the few who do receive loan forgiveness, like Leanna Mulvihill, a 26-year-old farmer in Germantown, New York, it can be transformative. The money allowed Mulvihill to jumpstart her business, Four Legs Farm, where she raises sheep, cows and pigs. While attending college in New York, Mulvihill studied environmental engineering, which she says has made her a better steward of the land by improving her grasp of ecosystems, allowing her to plan grazing in a more responsible way. Product marketing classes in college also helped her Loan forgiveness allowed her to buy more livestock, better equipment, and more land. Without the program, she says, farming full-time “wouldn’t have been an option.”

Earlier this year, a Wisconsin congressman proposed a similar program to reimburse up to $30,000 of student loans if farmers – especially those who use sustainable techniques and demonstrate financial need – stay in the state for five years. In New Mexico, state Rep. Matthew McQueen is trying to introduce a similar program. Last year, he started discussing legislation that would add farmers to the list of public service careers. “To me the crux of it is the idea that it’s a public service,” he says. “It would be another tool to help young people get into farming, which is a really difficult profession. It’s just a way to help get them established.”

Casey Holland works on Red Tractor Farm.

NYFC

However, such programs face many limitations, particularly lack of funding. McQueen says the bill will stall because New Mexico won’t secure funding for at least a year or two for any sort of loan forgiveness program. It’s just not high on the priority list for the state. If it does get through, McQueen also wants to offer loan forgiveness options for New Mexico students who attend community colleges or technical schools rather than a four-year university, opening the door for more applicants.

Another obstacle is the paucity of data on how young farmers impact agricultural economies, which makes it harder to convince state legislatures and Congress of the merits of paying back student debt. Hansen often receives pushback on the importance and popularity of farming. It raises a perturbing question with no easy answers: Is farming truly a public service career? And if so, what other low-earning careers might be added to the list?

Expanding the ranks of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Act will be a tough sell: Although the program remains in place, it faces tight budget restrictions. There’s been no progress for higher education bills at the federal level, let alone to add farmers to the list of public service careers, which forces the coalition to concentrate on the state level. They do it for farmers like Holland, who still dreams about owning land so she can contribute more to the agriculture industry. But, she says, “to build food resiliency, and invest in a community, you need someone to invest in you.”

Lyndsey Gilpin is an editorial fellow at High Country News. She tweets@lyndseygilpin

]]>No publisherSmall towns, big changeAgricultureFoodPoliticsEducation2016/09/05 04:05:00 GMT-6ArticleIs there a way to revive drought-stricken soil?http://www.hcn.org/articles/potato-farming-center-colorado
In Colorado, potato-farming brothers are saving water by using cover crops innovatively.Brendon Rockey ran his fingers through crumbly soil on a warm August morning, kneeling in the same dirt his father and grandfather farmed before him.

The mostly edible medley growing underfoot – 16 different vegetables, legumes and grasses in all – will never make it to market for this Colorado farmer. Instead, Rockey will leave these crops to decompose in the earth, their remains creating a nutrient-rich soil he hopes will grow better potatoes next year, all while using about two-thirds less water than a typical potato crop.

Brendon (left) and Sheldon Rockey (right), stand in a portion of their Center, Colorado, field where they planted a mix of vegetables, legumes and grasses, known as cover crops, to enhance the soil’s ability to hold water.

Leah Todd, Solutions Journalism Network

Among the myriad strategies farmers in Colorado’s San Luis Valley have attempted during a decade-long, soil-wracking drought is planting cover crops: efficient plants that enhance the soil’s ability to hold water. Cover cropping has helped Rockey slash water use by 40 percent and eliminate synthetic fertilizers.

“It’s all about building a resilient system that takes care of itself,” Rockey said of his business, Rockey Farms, which he operates with his brother, Sheldon, 41. The Rockeys’ cover crop mix includes legumes that pull nitrogen from the air and store it in the soil, allowing the brothers to create nitrogen-rich fields without dousing them in chemicals. More organic matter in the ground, like decomposing roots of the cover crops, makes better soil; better soil needs less water; less water means more valley farmers can sustain their livelihoods.

More farmers here are adopting the practice, said Samuel Essah, an associate professor with Colorado State University’s San Luis Valley Research Center. It’s a model that, in theory, could work for bigger operations.

Even so, cover crops are used on only about 1 percent of farmland nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, though the trend is increasing. The sparse uptake is partly due to economics: Cover cropping requires part of a farm to go out of production each year, growing fewer cash crops and, in turn, generating less revenue. And the transition doesn’t happen overnight. It took several years for the Rockeys to see the kinds of soil benefits that saved them money – a tough sell to banks that expect a loan payment every year.

In some ways, the Rockeys are poster children of the San Luis Valley, a largely agricultural region the size of New Jersey flanked by mountain ranges and home to about 45,000 residents. Their grandfather established the farm in 1938. Today, four generations later, the Rockeys’ children are growing up in the fields. On a recent morning, Ellaree Rockey, 10, drove a tractor the size of a mobile home.

But a few things set Rockey Farms apart. For one, they plant cover crops on half of their 500 acres, instead of just a fraction of their operation, each year.

Ellaree Rockey, 10, steps down from the tractor she was just driving across her family’s farm.

Leah Todd, Solutions Journalism Network

They’re also experimenting with more diverse cover crops than other farmers. Whereas some farmers in the San Luis Valley rotate potatoes with a single crop – one favorite is a grass called Sorghum Sudan – the Rockeys plant a 16-species mix.

Instead of spraying insecticides or other chemicals, the Rockeys plant flowers to attract insects that eat disease-carrying bugs – a practice unrelated to their water-saving efforts, but important to controlling viruses.

The Rockeys didn’t always farm like this. Though their family has always been innovative – their uncle, a former missile range worker with a Ph.D. in physics, experimented with injecting ozone into irrigation water, a practice the Rockeys still use – until recently the Rockeys farmed much like their neighbors, rotating potatoes and barley, irrigating their crop circles with sprinklers the length of football fields.

But, fighting against hard and compacted soil, they turned to cover crops, whose root systems break up the ground and create pores for rainwater to infiltrate into the dirt. Cover crops were also an alternative to barley, which hosted a fungal disease that harmed their potatoes. Their uncle had read about the practice, and in 2000 they decided to give it a try.

Brendon Rockey walks through his family’s potato field next to a long strip of flowers he planted to attract beneficial insects that help prevent disease.

Leah Todd, Solutions Journalism Network

Then, water got scarce. A multi-year drought starting around 2002 shrank the region’s water table, drying up wells and forcing farmers to take some acres entirely out of production.

“We are definitely now doing it for water savings,” Sheldon Rockey said. “We would never switch back, because we couldn’t afford to.”

Growing a field of barley takes about 20 inches of water, according to the San Luis Valley Research Center’s Samuel Essah. A crop of Russet potatoes typically needs about 18. Only about seven inches of rain fall in the valley each year, so farmers pump the rest from their shared aquifer.

The Rockeys say their soil’s improved water retention has allowed them to grow potatoes using just 14 inches of water, instead of 18. The 16-species cover crop mix needs just six inches to flourish, cutting their overall water use by about a third.

The benefits of cover crops are more than just anecdotal. Studies have shown that cover crops improve soil, slow wind erosion, help control pests and weeds and, in some cases, even improve yield. A survey by Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education of more than 700 Midwestern farmers in 2012, for instance, found corn planted after cover crops had a 10 percent higher yield than adjacent fields without cover crops. The survey found that yields were even higher in areas hard-hit by drought.

By saving on water and the cost of synthetic fertilizers, the Rockeys make as much money now as they did when they farmed and sold both potatoes and barley. “For their varieties, it’s working,” said Essah. “Whether that can work (on a large scale), that’s where we are not sure.”

The Rockeys farm a special kind of potato called fingerlings, a niche product that draws up to three times the price of a mainstream potato, like the Russet. That’s a potential problem for transporting this strategy to bigger farms. Although some large-scale farmers have pioneered the practice in other regions, using other crops, it’s unclear whether potato farmers with slimmer profit margins can take half their farm out of production each year, like the Rockeys have, and still make ends meet.

Cover crops need water, too, a turnoff for some farmers whose water supplies are already limited, said Rudy Garcia, a soil health specialist for the National Resources Conservation Service. A Texas A&M study found multi-species cover crop mixes, like the blend that the Rockeys use, require the most water of any cover crop studied, but also create the most soil-fueling biomass. For the strategy to work, the water savings from healthier soil have to outweigh the water a farmer uses on the cover crops themselves. And that might not be the case for everyone: research suggests the benefits of cover cropping are highly site-specific, and can vary widely.

“Because they’ve already mastered their conventional system, large-scale farms are going to have to be shown (its effects) before they adopt it on a large scale,” Garcia said. “Cover crops are much easier to introduce (to) small-scale farmers.”

For the Rockeys, eliminating synthetic fertilizer and reducing water use is not just about yielding a better crop. It’s about ensuring the future of their community by naturally improving soil and reducing water use. Their father, after all, was the first to warn the Rockey boys about drought as they grew up in the 1980s.

Even then, he saw the future of the valley irrevocably tied to the future of its water.